Sunday, 31 May 2015

Americans pride ourselves on being people who have a government. But these days, it more often seems as if we’ve got a government that has people.

And that government is even selecting who its people will be, having–within a generation–essentially imported a state’s worth of new people through immigration.

Since 1970, the number of “Hispanics of Mexican origin” in the U.S. has jumped from fewer than 1 million to more than 33 million. If all these Mexicans were a state, it would be the second largest in population in the country, trailing only California.

Did you vote to approve that immigration policy? Did anyone? In fact, the federal government allowed it to happen without any voter input.

Well, no, there was constant voter input. Voters chose to believe the obvious lies they were being told about the harmlessness of illegals. Voters chose to build a limitless welfare state rather than force the native underclass into “jobs Americans won’t do.” Voters chose to save a few bucks at the supermarket and the fast food restaurant by embedding a swarm of invaders that will cost them far more on tax day. Voters asked for these policies and they got them—good and hard. (Via InstaPundit.)

The nation’s two-decades-long crime decline may be over. Gun violence in particular is spiraling upward in cities across America. In Baltimore, the most pressing question every morning is how many people were shot the previous night. Gun violence is up more than 60% compared with this time last year, according to Baltimore police, with 32 shootings over Memorial Day weekend. May has been the most violent month the city has seen in 15 years.

In Milwaukee, homicides were up 180% by May 17 over the same period the previous year. Through April, shootings in St. Louis were up 39%, robberies 43%, and homicides 25%. “Crime is the worst I’ve ever seen it,” said St. Louis Alderman Joe Vacarro at a May 7 City Hall hearing.

[...]

The most plausible explanation of the current surge in lawlessness is the intense agitation against American police departments over the past nine months.

Since last summer, the airwaves have been dominated by suggestions that the police are the biggest threat facing young black males today. A handful of highly publicized deaths of unarmed black men, often following a resisted arrest—including Eric Garner in Staten Island, N.Y., in July 2014, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in August 2014 and Freddie Gray in Baltimore last month—have led to riots, violent protests and attacks on the police. Murders of officers jumped 89% in 2014, to 51 from 27.

Friday, 29 May 2015

A stunning indictment has raised questions about alleged misdeeds by former House Speaker Dennis Hastert.

The allegations include violations of federal banking laws and lying to the FBI. They also claim he paid hush money to cover up a relationship prosecutors say was improper, but the nature of that alleged misconduct remains a mystery, reports CBS News correspondent Jan Crawford.

According to the indictment, the former House Speaker agreed to pay $3.5 million in 2010 to a person identified only as “Individual A,” in an effort to “compensate and conceal” Hastert’s “prior misconduct.”

The indictment doesn’t reveal details of the misconduct, but it does note the two have known each other for “most of Individual A’s life” and that the individual is from the same Illinois town where from 1965 to 1981 “Hastert was a high school teacher and ‎wrestling coach.”

To conceal the relationship, prosecutors allege that Hastert, over a four year period, withdrew a total of $1.7 million from a number of his personal bank accounts to give to Individual A.

So Hastert was either involved in a lucrative scheme to fix high school wrestling matches or, ya know, the other thing. Oh wait, there’s no betting on high school wrestling matches ... (Via Drudge.)

Thursday, 28 May 2015

That phrase has been rattling in my skull for months now on any number of topics. It’s the antidote to the “narrative” nonsense that infects so much of our politics. Kevin Williamson is on the same page, in a takedown of Bernie Sanders’s abysmal misunderstanding of economics:

Right now, we are embroiled in a deeply, deeply stupid debate over whether to raise the statutory minimum wage to $15 an hour. (I write “statutory minimum wage” because the real minimum wage is always and everywhere $0.00 an hour, as any unemployed person can confirm for you.) Because everything in the economy is in reality priced relative to everything else, using the machinery of government to monkey around with the number of little green pieces of paper that attaches to an hour’s labor manning the register at 7-Eleven or taking orders at Burger King is, necessarily, an exercise in futility. The underlying hierarchy of values — the relative weighting between six months’ work washing dishes and six months’ tuition at the University of Texas — is not going to change. Prices in markets are not arbitrary — they are reflections of how real people actually value certain goods and services in the real world. Arbitrarily changing the dollar numbers attached to those preferences does not change the underlying reality any more than trimming Cleveland off a map of the United States actually makes Cleveland disappear.

[...]

Markets adapt to political changes, and the hierarchy of values that distinguishes between an hour’s worth of warehouse management, an hour’s worth of composing poetry, an hour’s worth of brain surgery, and an hour’s worth of singing pop songs is not going to change because a politician says so, or because a group of politicians says so, or because 50 percent + 1 of the voters say so, or for any other reason. To think otherwise is the equivalent of flat-earth cosmology. In the long term, people’s needs and desires are what they are; in the short term, you can cause a great deal of chaos in the economy and you can give employers additional reasons to automate rote work. But you cannot make a fry-guy’s labor as valuable as a patent lawyer’s by simply passing a law.

This is not a matter of opinion — that is how the world actually works. One of the many corrosive effects of having a political apparatus and a political class dominated by lawyers is that the lawyerly conflation of opinion with reality becomes a ruling principle. Lawyers and high-school debaters (the groups are not alien to one another) operate in a world in which opinion is reality: If you convince the jury or the debate judges that your argument is superior, or if you can get them to believe that your position is the correct one, then you win, and the question of who wins is the most important one if you are, e.g., on trial for murder. But if you shot that guy you shot that guy, regardless of what the jury says — facts are facts. Galileo et al. were right (or closer to right) about the organization of the solar system than were Fra Hieronimus de Casalimaiori and the Aristotelians, and the fact that Galileo lost at trial didn’t change that.

Yesterday I offered readers two choices for Clinton scandal of the day. Had I waited a few hours, I could have offered a third:

The Clinton global charity has received between $50,000 and $100,000 from soccer’s governing body and has partnered with the Fédération Internationale de Football Association on several occasions, according to donor listings on the foundation’s website.

Several top FIFA executives were arrested Wednesday in Zurich and face corruption charges stretching back two decades, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Involvement with the embattled body extends beyond the foundation to Bill Clinton himself. The former president was an honorary chairman of the bid committee put together to promote the United States as a possible host nation for the 2018 or 2022 World Cup.

When the U.S. lost the 2022 bid to Qatar, Clinton was rumored to be so upset he shattered a mirror.

Geez, you’d think that Bill Clinton, of all people, would know when the fix was in.

Again, my apologies. I will never again underestimate the cynicism and corruption of these soulless grifters.

The states are the laboratories of democracy and I’d love to see him try out some of his more ambitious programs in one state, not fifty:

“There is crime going on all across America. It is not a racial thing, it is a spiritual problem,” Paul said. “I think government can play a role in public safety, but I don’t think government can mend a broken spirit. Government can’t provide you salvation, government can’t save you. … Ultimately, salvation is something you accept yourselves.”

I guess some racial groups are just less spiritual than others, based on crime statistics.

He advocated for reclassifying nonviolent felonies to misdemeanors as part of his call to end “mass incarceration” in America.

“We’ve got to rethink the war on drugs. We’ve got to find a better way,” Paul said. “We’ve got to treat drugs as a health problem, not an incarceration problem.”

And you thought health insurance was expensive now ...

Paul proposed what he called “economic freedom zones” to dramatically lower corporate and income taxes for businesses in impoverished areas while also cutting the payroll taxes of their employees. He said the program would represent a $400 million tax cut for South Side businesses and could have prevented a nearby McDonald’s from closing.

Wednesday, 27 May 2015

Under Clinton's leadership, the State Department approved $165 billion worth of commercial arms sales to 20 nations whose governments have given money to the Clinton Foundation, according to an IBTimes analysis of State Department and foundation data. That figure -- derived from the three full fiscal years of Clinton’s term as Secretary of State (from October 2010 to September 2012) -- represented nearly double the value of American arms sales made to the those countries and approved by the State Department during the same period of President George W. Bush’s second term.

The Clinton-led State Department also authorized $151 billion of separate Pentagon-brokered deals for 16 of the countries that donated to the Clinton Foundation, resulting in a 143 percent increase in completed sales to those nations over the same time frame during the Bush administration. These extra sales were part of a broad increase in American military exports that accompanied Obama’s arrival in the White House.

The newly released financial files on Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton’s growing fortune omit a company with no apparent employees or assets that the former president has legally used to provide consulting and other services, but which demonstrates the complexity of the family’s finances.

Because the company, WJC, LLC, has no financial assets, Hillary Clinton’s campaign was not obligated to report its existence in her recent financial disclosure report, officials with Bill Clinton’s private office and the Clinton campaign said. They were responding to questions by The Associated Press, which reviewed corporate documents.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to provide private details of the former president’s finances on the record, said the entity was a "pass-through" company designed to channel payments to the former president.

Under federal ethics disclosure rules, declared candidates do not have to report assets worth less than $1,000. But the company’s existence demonstrates the complexity of tracking the Clintons’ finances as Hillary Clinton ramps up her presidential bid.

That sentiment is so strong among US Marines that Amazon markets a flag to them:

But an equivalent sentiment, “No weapon formed against me shall prosper,” may be in bad odor with the USMC itself:

A United States Marine was convicted at a court-martial for refusing to remove a Bible verse on her computer – a verse of Scripture the military determined “could easily be seen as contrary to good order and discipline.”

The plight of Lance Corporal Monifa Sterling seems unbelievable – a member of the Armed Forces criminally prosecuted for displaying a slightly altered passage of Scripture from the Old Testament: “No weapon formed against me shall prosper.”

Sterling, who represented herself at trial, was convicted February 1, 2014 in a court-martial at Camp Lejune [sic], North Carolina after she refused to obey orders from a staff sergeant to remove the Bible verses from her desk.

The reporter writes “Bible verses” but includes only one. There’s plenty of pacifist claptrap in the Bible that would be prejudicial to the good order of a fighting force. This particular verse isn’t. What were the other verses?

Personally, I used to have a John Stuart Mill quotation at my desk while on active duty:

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.